Instant Genius - Should we be worried about sex robots? – Kate Devlin

Episode Date: December 5, 2018

AI ethicist Dr Kate Devlin has done a deep dive into intimacy with machines for her new book Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots. She’s looked into society’s gradually changing attitudes towards sex tech and visited the companies making the world’s most advanced sex robots, and she’s here to tell us what it all means. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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come from? Where is this idea of the artificial partner come from? What stories are there? You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Focus magazine. Dr Kate Devlin studies the way sex, gender and sexuality are incorporated into artificial intelligence. In 2016, she ran the first ever sex tech hackathon and she co-chairs the annual love and sex with robots convention. As our ability to do,

develop human-like robots is continually advancing, Kate's investigating what the rise of intimacy with AI means for us. For her new book, Turned On, Science, Sex and Robots, she's looked into the history of artificial companions, explored our gradually changing attitudes towards sex tech, and chronicled to the development of the world's most advanced sex robots. Now, she's here to tell us what it all means. Who benefits from this new tech? And who suffers? How will this impact relationships between humans. Here's BBC Focus editorial assistant Helen Glennie, talking to Kate Devlin. You just outlined to me what you did for your book.

Who did you talk to and what sort of topics around sex robots did you look at? I was really curious to see how we got to this point, where we're actually starting to see the manufacture and seal of such things. And so I looked at the history of it all. Where has it come from? Where is this idea of the artificial partner come from? what stories are there. And I looked as well at sex toy development. So how does that differ from sex dolls? And then it was a matter of exploring really advances that might lead us into new forms

of care and companionship in robots and into more intimate areas. So after that, it was a discussion of, is this a good thing for society? Who is benefits from this? Who might suffer because of this? Just to sort of sum up your overall feelings on the whole thing, is the book Is it positive about the use of these robots? Is it negative? Is it neutral? I try to be as objective as possible. But I think at the end of the day, I'm a tech optimist. And I think that there's a lot of scope for technology to enhance people's lives and to enhance relationships, intimate relationships, not necessarily sexually, but certainly in terms of intimacy. I don't necessarily think that the current form of these sex robots is the solution to that. I think there are problems tied to the form that they are currently in, but I do see a lot of scope

for using technology to enhance people's lives, bring pleasure and strengthen relationships. Can you give me a bit of background information on sex robots? How long have they been around and in what sort of forms? Well, I mean, they're really only just around in that the first commercially developed one is going, has gone on sale and is about to be shipped out to the customer any day now. But the idea of sex robots has been around for much, much longer, going right back, you know, millennia into myth, into stories that we've told down the centuries. And so can you explain to me about those historical ones? What were they?

What were people imagining? Well, some of the earliest accounts we have are stories from Greece, where we had people making replicas of their dead lovers, the dead husbands, actually. In fact, the very first story with someone that has an artificial lover, it's a woman making a model in bronze or in wax of her husband who died in battle. That's one of the myths that sprung up. And of course, the one everyone's familiar with is Pygmalion, the sculptor who brought his sculpture to life with a kiss. And so now just going forward to these days, these ones that are about to get shipped out to the customer that have just been developed, what level of technology are we talking about? Can you describe this robot? Sure.

Well, this robot is essentially the only part of it is robotic is its head. So it has an animatronic head. The body is completely stationary from the neck down. It's essentially a well-made, high-end sex doll that has some animatronics and that has an AI personality. Aha. And so what can it do? How much interaction can you have? You can have conversations with it.

You can certainly have more physical interactions with. it if you so desire. Essentially, the dolls are really carefully crafted and they tend to be quite hypersexualized, quite reductive stereotypes of the female body. So narrow waist, large breasts, long legs. And this animatronic head is the bit where, you know, it can, it can smile, it can look at you, it can turn its head. And the voice comes out of it, this AI chatbot. more or less, emits from the head. So this seems like a sort of a lesser version of what people might be aiming for in the future. Yeah, we are not at Westworld levels yet, no.

So it's really very basic. And when we think about sex robot, we imagine some kind of usually pretty realistic looking gynoid, female human-like robots, perhaps with a dangerous edge, because sci-fi likes to tell us that these things, these are women who have a dangerous edge of femme fatale. And the actual reality of this is that we're essentially looking at kind of an up-market mannequin. The fact that these have come around now, is that because the technology has suddenly allowed it, or is there some sort of social need that's playing into this? It's very much that the technology has come around. And that people have been asking, particularly sex doll owners, have been asking for interactivity.

And of course, it's something long imagined. So, you know, there's a little bit of, well, can we do this? Can we make an artificial partner? But really, it boils down to the fact that we're now at the stage where the animatronics are cheap and easy enough to make these things. It's not an easy task to make it, but the components are there. And AI voice interaction has got a lot better in the past five years. What about in the future? Do you have an idea of what the companies that are making these?

aiming towards? Yeah, there are very few companies actually making these. I mean, worldwide, it's really just a handful of workshops that are making them. There's no large-scale production here. So for the near future, we're not really going to see as much as you might expect, as much as some of the tabloid newspapers might have you to believe. So there's no fear here of human relationships being replaced or anything like that. At the moment, it's a really niche market for people who possibly already own a sex,

and want to have some kind of interactivity in those. And you mentioned this niche market. Can you sort of explain who the customer is? Is there a typical customer? Typical in that it is generally going to be a man. This is the piece of technology that's made predominantly for straight men. But in terms of who those are and who would be buying those, it really, it differs. So there are people who buy sex dolls currently for companionship,

whereas sex is a secondary feature in the dolls, really. There are other people who buy them because they fetishize the dolls themselves. There are people who buy them from curiosity of an engineering stance, really. So they admire the work, the crafts that goes into it. So there are some people who buy them just to pose them and photograph them. So it's really hard to say if there's a typical user in terms of personality or lifestyle. But certainly in demographic terms, it tends to be, it's aimed at straight men. Can you tell me the arguments in favour of these robots?

Can you give me the sales pitch? Sure. Okay. So it kind of is that people I bear may have no one, may be lonely, and perhaps sex robots are a way of giving those people someone that they can love and who will give the appearance of loving them back. Or, you know, just for pleasure purposes, is someone that they can have as a sexual partner.

And in some ways, that may be a thing that could happen, yes. But then there is the negative side where we look at what's happening and we say, well, these sex robots are being sold in a form of a very objectified view of women. So we've got these crevacious Barbie-like figures. And, you know, what happens if people treat these badly? Does that spill into real life? What happens if someone makes a childlike version, for example, what happens with data, privacy and security, anything that's connected to the internet, it's hackable, what happens if all your sexual secrets are stolen? So I think there's many different aspects to this, and I tried to explore what those might be.

It doesn't seem like this is just about sex. It could be about physical intimacy or companionship. What uses did you see around that? The closest parallel we have to the sex robots that might become more commonplace is the sex doll. And we know that there are communities of doll owners right across the world. And a lot of people are buying them because they want companionship and they dress these dolls up and give them names, personalities, backstories. And they have the dolls integrated into their lives. So in some ways it may be that the sex robots can be a more enhanced version of that.

And I guess we kind of know now a bit about this loneliness epidemic and the fact that it does have physical effects on the body. Did you, were you able to find out whether having a sex doll or a sex robot companion that wasn't a real human? Does that help with the health effects? It's difficult because this technology is really in its infancy and there hasn't been all that many extensive studies of people who own and keep and use sex dolls. So it's really hard to say long term and widespread whether or not this has beneficial effect.

Although we can look at parallels in other areas such as care robots, companion robots, there have been studies that show that people can benefit from companion robots, perhaps therapeutic animal robots. They can bond with them and that it helps communication. it helps them feel less lonely. So we can look at the parallels there and think, well, maybe that could be the same if we had that with the sex robots too. And what sort of level of technology are those care robots? Care and companion robots differ in terms of how they work.

So the most common ones that have been looked at are things like paro the seal. Paro's little seal pup, very, very cute, very little seal pup who makes terrapy noises and maize his head and bats his eyelashes. And I'm already talking about paro as if it's a living thing with a sex here. I'm saying he. But it's quite convincing. It is like having a little pet that doesn't need to be fed or cleaned up after. And people really do bond with paro and stroke him and talk about him.

So we know that those have been trialed in things like nursing homes to help residents feel less lonely. and they've had some positive results. What about other therapeutic uses? Is there any... Are people saying to think that maybe they could use sex dolls or sex robots to help people overcome things like intimacy issues? Certainly there have been sex toys used in trials this way to help people perhaps overcome sexual trauma.

Whether or not that would work the same way with sex robots remains to be seen, but it's definitely a possibility. And what about using these as could they have a role in the treatment or rehabilitation of sex offenders? The idea that sex robots could be used in treating sex offenders is really controversial and rightly so. It's something that needs a lot of consideration and thought. Virtual reality has been used in trials to see whether or not sex offenders are rehabilitated. So you can put someone who is a sex offender into a virtual environment and check their response. is checked to see whether or not they become aroused

if you give them a certain virtual stimulus. This is difficult to see whether or not ethically that should be extended into 3D, into the robots. The people who ran the VR trials are skeptical that a sex robot, particularly a childlike sex robot if working with paedophiles, they're skeptical that that would be beneficial. And often people who work with sex offenders

have said, no, don't give the opportunity to offend in that way. Don't give that possibility. So I think this is definitely an area that needs to be regulated and the close I needs to be kept on it. That said, there's no one making, that we know of currently making sex robots that are childlike, for example.

And not that they're going to admit it if they are, I would presume, but sex robots themselves, there's no one really even making those. So it's definitely not going into that area yet. the potential is there. With sex offenders, if someone is going to be harmful, if someone is going to enact harm on a robot, that's a different thing to look at.

So it may be that people do treat these badly, whether or not that would spill into real life is a whole other issue. Because if we look at things like computer games, for example, there was always a worry that computer game violence would lead to real life violence, but we don't have evidence of that. or rather we have a lot of evidence, but on both sides, it's inconclusive. And is anybody starting to look into that? Or is this stuff at the moment totally the realm of the companies that are making it

and there's not too much research going on? There are some research going on. The foundation for responsible robotics has been looking more closely at sex offenders in terms of pedophilia and whether or not that is something that needs to be considered. So there is a lot of academic work that has sprung up a role. around this in the past few years. So I'm by no means the first person to work on sex robots that's been around for a while as an academic topic. But it's seen a lot of a lot of a growth in the past few years because it's getting to the stage now where people are manufacturing

them. Okay. And so are you doing research, as an academic, are you doing research on sex robots? Yes, in terms of this, the book really recounts the sort of theory behind it all. But I work also in AI ethics and I look at whether or not the developing technology, are beneficial or what we should be considering when we develop technology. So it ties in with that. It sits within the broader field of AI and ethics. Okay. And what specific things are you looking at in your research group at the moment?

Sort of things that I'm particularly interested in are issues around gender bias in technology. That's obviously illustrated really well by this hyper-female form of the sex robots. So in a way we can look at sex robots as being a kind of, a microcosm of the tech industry in that it's geared very, very particularly towards a group of straight men. There are a lot of also of race issues coming in there as well, of ethnicity, where the dolls are by and large white and blonde. So we can see those sort of factors at play that are at play also in Silicon Valley in larger

sites of tech development. So I think that's a very interesting thing to look at in terms of how these things are being marketed and developed. Yeah, definitely. So what do you think is going on around those social effects? Do you think these dolls, because they're being made in this Barbie-like, you know, tall blonde form, are they encouraging sort of weird expectations around what people should be looking for on a partner or anything like that? I think it does entrenched stereotypes. It's not great. You know, it just adds to yet more issues around body image and expectations about how women should look. So I think that is, we'd like to move away from that.

I think it can be quite detrimental overall to society. And is anybody starting to move away from that? Well, I've tried. So in 2016 and 2017, along with my students at Goldsmith, I ran a sex tech hackathon. and Hackathon is where you get people together for usually 24 or 48 hours and they develop new technology. They prototype new technology. So we brought together people from all walks of life, so not just students, all ages, from different backgrounds, designers, techies, psychologists, artists, musicians. We brought them all together and said, what can we do to make technology

for intimacy that isn't based around a human form? And it was fascinating to see these devoutes There's new forms of technology that weren't just focused on sex, but also on intimacy more broadly, but to see what could be done when people thought, how can we make technology that responds to us in essential manner or in intimate manner or that connects to people? Yeah, that's quite an amazing brief. What did people come up with? Oh, amazing things. So we had people who repurposed existing things. So we had someone who hacked a vibrator so that it could, it would buzz. along to a baseline of a musical track. We had people who, a group that did soft robotics, they made a product that was almost like tentacles made out of silicone and these tentacles would squeeze a body part. You could put it on your body and it would hug it. We had someone else create a shawl that had sensors in it. So if you were in a virtual space or an augmented

reality situation, the sensors in the shawl would trigger as you walk through a virtual things you could feel the scene on your body. It would respond to your environment. So lots of really, really cool things going on. There were other examples that fostered intimacy between people. So clothing that if you unzipped it and you had an app and if you liked the fantasy and your partner liked fantasy, you signalled this by unzipping the zip as an electronic zip. And if you both unzipped the zip, you were both into it and it matched it up and you could have gone and explain. floor your fantasies while I'm zipping your clothes. Well, it's quite amazing.

Did the idea for that come out of you or your team believing that it's best to move away from these things being in human form? Yes, that's right. So everyone I've talked to that works in sex, techs is really excited by the possibilities of new materials, of new forms and new designs. So it's a really lovely area to work in because there's some really good start-ups out there making fascinating new sex toys that don't look anything like the old-fashioned ones and certainly don't look anything like human body parts. If we go back to these sex robots here, can you outline the arguments against them specifically for the user? Are there any psychological impact, anything like that that we should be looking out for?

there is a worry I think quite a natural fear that people have that there will be some kind of dependency or overuse or addiction and we hear that about all forms of technology I mean the current thing is that we're all too addicted to smartphones for example and in some outlier cases that may be true there are people who don't know when to stop and put down their phone I'm occasionally guilty of it myself there are people who get addicted to video games for example so we know there are outliers where people can't moderate their behavior well and it's could be that they would suffer from this. I think a very compelling argument is that the ideal relationship is a human-human one, not a human-machine one. I completely understand that. I honestly don't think that sex robots are going to replace human-human relationships at all. I think they can enhance those, and I think they may be a substitute at times where that's not a possible thing to have, but I certainly don't think we're going to get down the root of seeing people replaced by robots in our intimate lives. Do you think there are some situations in which the human-human relationship is not the best one? Yeah, I mean, maybe not the best one, but there

are certainly times when a human-human relationship is difficult, or if it's perhaps, or perhaps if it's a toxic relationship. It may be that people are in long-distance relationships or there are issues around what people want to do in those relationships. And maybe this is a way of introducing technology that can enhance the relationship. Can you just go into that a little bit further and explain how a robot would be used in, say, a long-distance relationship? Okay, so there are some examples of people using sex dolls in long-distance relationships. And so if they've not got someone around, they have this companion instead as a kind of a proxy,

really. But moving away from robots in particular, there's a lot of smart sex toys. these days that can be used over the internet. So you could have a sex toy, your partner who is elsewhere in the world can control it via the internet. So you're able to have that experience together while not in the same place. So perhaps it could be used like that. Is anybody looking at issues around consent with sex dolls or robots?

I imagine that these robots, they're not sentient beings. They don't need to give consent. are you looking into that? Is there anything going on in that area? Yeah, this has been a concern that gets flagged up a lot as well. So there was talk in the newspapers about a robot, a sex robot called Roxy, who had a mode called frigid phara. People got really worried about that and said,

truly if this robot has a frigid mode, this means it's basically enacting rape upon a robot. Obviously, you know, it's a machine. That's not the case. The thing about consent is, yeah, we don't need to ask consent from a robot right now because they are not sentient. They may never be sentient. But perhaps we should be modeling consent as a reflection of what we expect in society. And in fact, one of the manufacturers, one person who makes sex robots, who made the Samantha robots,

he was building consent into Samantha so that you had to kind of woo her in order to be able to actually have sex with her. So it is possible to incorporate the idea of consent into a robot, into a machine. That is possible. And it may be something that is desirable. Do you think if use of these robots becomes mainstream, there will be any efforts to regulate around things like consent? Like, are there any governing bodies where, you know, this would come under their jurisdiction? No, there's no government bodies for this kind of thing at all.

Countries will have laws, states will have laws over what is and isn't acceptable. So some countries have already banned sex dolls. Some countries don't allow sex toys, for example. In fact, AI ethics as a whole field runs into this problem all the time because there's no regulating body. And so corporations like Google or like Facebook, they don't have to adhere to any standards currently around the development of their AI. So we're definitely not going to see it in terms of standards to adhere to for these robots. in terms of regulation, broadly speaking, in terms of AI, there's certainly a lot of work going towards how we would do that. There's not really a governing body in place. It may be that we have to hold corporations to account so that perhaps they have industrial review boards or they have ethics committees that have to be completely transparent so we can see what's going on.

That's probably the most practical way of doing it. And when it comes to things like AI in weaponry, autonomous weapons, then we do have things like the UN who can be brought in to look at that and make decisions as well. Or countries can sign up to that to certain codes of ethics. So it's a very, very hard thing to do because there is no human set of ethics that is set in stone. We don't all have a unified code of ethics anywhere. So it's very, very difficult to think about how you would, first of all, decide on a set of ethics and secondly program it into a machine. So can we talk a little bit about the companies that are making these robots, the people who are making them? Did you talk to the people who are making them about where their motivation to make them came from?

Yeah. So I went to visit the Real Doll Workshop, Abyss Creations who make Real Doll are also the company who've brought out the world's first commercially available. sex robots. And I went there to see what the development process was like last year. And I spoke to Matt McMullen, the CEO of the company, and he explained that the one thing he had been asked for when making sex dolls was some form of interactivity. So his customers wanted to see some form of interactivity. And so they decided to start working on that. With other developers like Sergio Santos, who made the Samantha robot, he was very interested from an engineering point of view. So he wasn't interested in creating the actual doll.

He wasn't interested in creating the body. He was interested in the AI. How would you engineer this? How would you build this? How could you get a responsive machine that was capable of giving the idea of desire and sexuality? Do you think that this is something that we should be taken seriously? Can you imagine a point 20 years down the road where these are mainstream? Right now, I think this is an incredibly niche market.

and I don't see it changing much in the near future. This is really, there aren't many people making them. There aren't many being made. We don't really have an actual one in existence, you know, beyond pre-orders and prototypes. So no, I don't see this as being a big market. I think there's much more scope for creating intimate technologies that move away from this human form that is so difficult to make. and into more abstract forms, into more immersive experiences,

into more wearable technologies. That was Kate Devlin, talking about the rise of sex robots. Her book, Turned On, Science, Sex and Robots is available from Bloomsbury Sigma Now. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast. In our December issue, we dig deep into the surface of Mars and explore what NASA's Insight mission

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